Recently by Michael Banks

Crusty problems for the LHC

By Michael Banks

Oh crumbs.

After talk of the Higgs boson travelling back in time and sabotaging the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN particle-physics lab, a more mundane object temporarily stopped the machine from operating on Tuesday night.

According to a note posted today on the CERN users’ pages, a piece of baguette placed in a cooling station caused a sector in the LHC to heat up by a few degrees to the bemusement of engineers.

The 27 km circumference LHC has eight sectors, each 3.3 km long. Each sector has a cooling station, or “cryoplant”, which helps the machine get down to the chilly temperature of 4.2 K.

The crusty piece of bread was found in one of the cryoplants and happened to be lying on a busbar — an electrical connection made of copper that are generally wide and flat to allow heat to dissipate more easily.

The well placed baguette then caused a short circuit in the cryogenic equipment that heated one of the sectors to around 10 K.

“The best guess is that it was dropped by a bird, either that or it was thrown out of a passing aeroplane,” a spokeswoman from CERN told the Times.

But it seems the best guess was right after all. The note on the CERN users page said that the culprit was a “bird carrying a baguette bread” and that the “bird escaped unharmed but lost its bread”.

The statement read: “The standard failsafe systems came into operation and after the cause was identified, re-cooling of the machine began and the sectors were back at operating temperature last night. The incident was similar in effect to a standard power cut, for which the machine protection systems are very well prepared.”

At least the note didn’t say that it was a bird travelling back in time with a piece of bread hellbent on sabotaging the LHC from finding the Higgs.

By Michael Banks

On Wednesday night US President Barack Obama hosted an astronomy night at the White House.

Obama, who today won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Peace, invited 150 school students, former astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Sally Ride, and Mae Jemison and NASA administrator Chalres Boldren and his deputy Lori Garver to the event on the South Lawn.

Astronomers spent all day setting up 20 telescopes in preparation for the party in the evening.

Obama was also joined by the first lady, Michelle Obama, and his science advisor, John Holdren.

Obama managed to get some education policy into his speech and talked about reinvigorating maths and science in schools.

“Galileo changed the world when he pointed his telescope to the sky,” Obama said to the youngsters, “and now it is your turn.”

By Michael Banks

Outreach raps or songs about science are all the rage these days. Last year we had the Large Hadron Rap by Kate McAlpine and more recently she released a rare-isotope rap for the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory.

Indeed, Steven Rush — aka Funky49 — recently released a rap about the Tevatron for Fermilab entitled Particle Business.

Not to be outdone, Australia’s national science agency — The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization — has teamed up with Sydney University’s Science Revue to release a song about seemingly every science topic.

Featuring “Chem”, “Bio”, “Psych”, “Phys” and “Maths”, they have done a take on the Backstreet Boys’ hit single: Everybody (Backstreet’s Back).

However, Instead of using “everybody” in the song, they have replaced it with climatology, oceanography, or indeed anything else that ends in -ography.

It is a well put together music video and they have upped the ante for science/geeky songs.

My favourite bit is when “Maths” appears wearing a chain around his neck with a rather large pi symbol attached to it singing the words “am I irrational”.

As they all seem to be students, I guess that “Maths” has had some help from “Chem” to make his rapper-like chain to appear to look like gold.

circular vision

By Michael Banks

I can’t imagine a science laboratory that doesn’t have a periodic table hung somewhere on the wall.

I even have a periodic table application on my iPhone that gives you all you need to know about a chosen element (admittedly it is not one of my more frequently used apps).

Yet while generations of science students have learned the periodic table first developed by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869, Mohd Abubakr from Microsoft Research in Hyderabad, India, thinks he has found an alternative way of visualizing it.

Abubakr says the major disadvantage with the current table is, well, the shape itself and that it doesn’t help to describe the properties of the elements.

He suggests instead using a “circular form” of the periodic table. His ‘table’ has seven layers, which are each divided into 18 sectors. These sectors each represent the groups in the original table.

However, as with the original table, the lanthanides and actinides are somewhat isolated and are arcs around the main ring.

Although on a first instance it looks like a new way to represent the elements, I haven’t found anything that is fundamentally different from Mendeleev’s table.

Abubakr says that as the new model looks a bit like an atom, with hydrogen and helium near the nucleus, it is better than the current table when trying to teach students the table.

We will see whether the new table takes off, but I don’t expect any updates to my app just yet.

By Michael Banks

With only one day left until the Nobel Prize for Physics is announced everyone, of course, will have their eyes on the eventual winners.

Yet what about the winner’s family and in particular their spouse: how will winning the prize affect their daily lives?

Anita Laughlin, the wife of the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Robert Laughlin from Stanford University who shared the 1998 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the fractional quantum-Hall effect, has written a behind-the-scenes account of what winning the prize can do to a family.

In Reindeer with King Gustav, Anita Laughlin describes the months after her husband won the prize and the mad rush to sort everything out for the big day in Stockholm.

I haven’t read the book yet, but if it is anything like the video posted on Anita Laughlin’s website to promote it then the account will make for an hilarious read.

“Dad, some guy is calling from Sweden,” is how the video starts, when the youngest son in the Laughlin household answers the phone at 02:30 on 13 October 1998.

Then in true Laurel and Hardy style, with Henry Mancini’s Shades of Sennett playing, the Laughlins rush around their bedroom already dressed in their evening attire to pack (or at least Anita Laughlin seems to be doing most of the packing, with Robert sitting on the bed holding a bottle of bubbly).

If you believe the video then the Laughlins seem to have got some sleep that evening, I just wonder how many physicists will instead be sat patiently by the phone tonight.

Space chill (credit: ESA/PACS/SPIRE)

By Michael Banks

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released the first images taken by its Herschel space telescope during a calibration run last month.

The awe-inspiring images show cold gas clouds lying near the Milky Way — thousands of light-years from Earth. Five infrared wavelengths have been colour-coded in the image to differentiate very cold material (shown in red) from the surrounding, slightly warmer stuff in blue.

Herschel — named after the German-born astronomer who in 1781 discovered Uranus — is a far-infrared and submillimetre telescope that will study star formation in our galaxy and galaxy formation across the universe.

Herschel was launched in April together with ESA’s Planck mission — a microwave observatory that will study the geometry and contents of the universe by finely measuring the comic microwave background (CMB) radiation, which is a remnant of the Big Bang.

The both occupy a place in space called the Lagrange point L2 — where a probe can usefully hover, little disturbed by stray signals from home and without having to use much fuel to keep it in position.

Herschel will investigate light with wavelengths of 55-670 μm and the satellite will look back to the early universe to see galaxy formations that are invisible to the likes of the Hubble Space Telescope because of gas and dust.

Larger areas of the Milky Way will now be surveyed by Herschel so look out for more cool images soon.

The 2008 Ig Nobel award

By Michael Banks

Maybe physicists are not doing enough research that “first makes people laugh, then think”.

Last night was the annual bash at Harvard University for the Ig Nobel awards, which are given by the humour magazine The Annals of Improbable Research and celebrates research that “cannot, or should not, be repeated”.

Each year the awards have an overall theme. Last year it was redundancy, and in 2007 it was, bizarrely, chickens which involved keynote speaker Doug Zonker repeating the word “chicken” for two minutes.

This year’s theme was risk and mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot gave a keynote address. But fitting in with the eccentricity of the event, every winner of an award had only 60 seconds to give a speech before an eight-year-old girl went up to that stage saying she was ‘bored’.

This year’s ‘physics’ prize went to three anthropologists: Katherine Whitcome from the University of Cincinnati, Daniel Lieberman from Harvard University and Liza Shapiro from the University of Texas won the award for determining why pregnant women do not tip over.

The work, published in Nature, found a difference in the spines of women and men, which allowed a pregnant woman to lean backward and counterbalance the weight of the developing fetus.

I didn’t find the work particularly hilarious and probably represents rather bona fide research.

The chemistry prize lived up more to the suggestion of making you laugh then think. This year’s prize went to Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for creating diamond films from tequila.

Other 2009 winners include Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, who won the prize for mathematics for “giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers”. Gono ordered bank notes in Zimbabwe to be printed with denominations ranging from one cent to one hundred trillion dollars.

Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson from Newcastle University’s school of agriculture were awarded the veterinary medicine prize for discovering that giving cows names increases their milk yield compared to unnamed cows.

The last few years have seen rather dubious awards given for physics. Last year was for understanding why knots form spontaneously in lengths of “agitated” string, while in 2007 the prize was won for the “physics of wrinkling” — providing insight into why drapes hang a certain way.

It was much better when the prize for physics was given for such things as levitating frogs, calculating that beer froth decays exponentially and finding the best way to dunk a biscuit in a cup of tea.

low vibrations

By Michael Banks

Yesterday I visited what is supposed to be the “quietest building in the world”. Being in Bristol and only a few kilometres away from our office, there was really no excuse but to visit.

The £11.5m Bristol Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information (NSQI) is housed at the University of Bristol next to the physics department.

Construction of the quietest building has taken over two years to complete and is seemingly quiet due to the huge amounts of concrete that have been poured into the ground beneath it.

“There is more than 2 m of concrete beneath our feet,” says Fred Hale, building manager of the NSQI, as he shows me round the basement of the building. “This is the right building, in the right place.”

The site in Bristol is well suited to hosting such a quiet lab since the ground under the building consists of solid rock.

Engineers excavated a one-storey deep hole in the rock and then filled it in with concrete. The centre was then constructed on this rather solid base.

The quietest room in the world

The four-storey building has a number of “quiet rooms” in the basement, where most of the experiments are housed. Each experiment then sits on an additional 24 tonne block of concrete separated from the floor by rubber bearings.

And if that wasn’t enough, each lab in the basement also sits inside a Faraday cage, and the temperature, air flow and acoustic noise in the room can also be strictly controlled.

So how does a building, or room, get to be called the quietest in the world? Well, according to Hale, the engineering firm that helped to build the rooms - Arup - reckon that vibration measurements taken on the concrete blocks are the lowest they have ever taken.

The centre will contain two clean rooms, a wet lab, eight low noise labs and two cell culture labs with research groups only just starting to put experiments into the labs.

The centre is meant to be a hub of interdisciplinary research with groups from the university’s biology, physics, chemistry and engineering departments using the new facility.

One such lab that was in use when I visited was using a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope, which can produce images if samples on the single-atom level. The low vibration environment is needed to produce very sharp images of the atoms under study.

NSQI is also home to one of the newly launched doctoral training centres. Funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the centre for functional nanomaterials will train up to 10 PhD students every year.

Sharper STM images

The second floor of the building is mostly meant to bring people from different disciplines together to discuss their work. Indeed, one of the coffee rooms was enlarged once a virtual walkthrough of the plans showed that there was not enough space for researchers to interact.

It seems like everyone is catered for. In one meeting room, for example, mathematicians demanded that blackboards be placed on the wall instead of white boards.

So while the basement may well be the quietest place in the world, researchers at NSQI will hope that the second floor is anything but.

Piled high and deeper

By Michael Banks

I have only ever reviewed a couple of manuscripts in what was my brief career as a research scientist.

I remember finding it quite exciting at first, as well as being honoured to be selected by a publishing house to be able to review articles submitted by my peers for publication.

However, being a busy researcher, running experiments and writing papers, by the time the third e-mail reminder landed in my inbox asking me to finish the review as quickly as possible, I could see how researchers get fed up of reviewing articles, sometimes as many as 20 per year.

Peer review, of course, has a serious and important role in science. Still, I was rather surprised to see that 86% of respondents to a new survey on peer-review practises say they actually enjoy reviewing.

Over 4000 researchers responded to a survey carried out by Sense About Science - a UK-based charity that promotes the public understanding of science.

In what is the largest international survey of authors and reviewers to date, Sense About Science has now released its preliminary findings from the 2009 survey.

Although the survey does not seem to reveal how many papers a researcher reviews per year, it does find that, on average, reviewers turn down two papers every year.

According to the survey, the biggest benefit of peer review is that it makes researchers feel like part of the community, with 90% of respondents saying this is why they do it. Only 16%, however, say that reviewing increases their chances of having future papers accepted.

There is the argument that due to the “publish or perish” ethos in science, there are not enough researchers to peer review the increasing number of articles being submitted to journals.

However, according to the survey only 20% of respondents thought that peer review is unsustainable because of too few willing reviewers.

There is also the tricky question whether peer review stops plagiarism and fraud. While 81% say that peer review should detect plagiarism and 79% say that it should prevent fraud, only around 35% say it is capable of doing both.

And lastly, 41% of researchers say they would like to be paid to peer review, but not at the cost of the author. More than half of respondents thought that a payment in kind such as a subscriptions would make the more likely to review.

Image of the Californian wildfires from NASA’s Terra satellite (credit: NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL)

By Michael Banks

The enormous wildfires in California are still threatening the Mount Wilson observatory sat 1742 m high in the San Gabriel Mountains near Pasadena, northeast of Los Angeles.

Yesterday, the fires crept nearer and the observatory’s website as well as the live webcam went down.

There was some hope, however, as Reuters reported that cooler weather as well as increased humidity had hampered the fires and firefighters hoped they could drive the fire away from the observatory.

Founded in 1904 by the US astronomer George Ellery Hale, the observatory still performs astronomical research via its 1.5 m Hale telescope and 2.5 m Hooker telescope, which was used by Edwin Hubble to discover that galaxies were moving away from us.

Regular updates on the wildfires are being provided by the Los Angeles Times and Georgia State University, which operates the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy at Mount Wilson.